by Cathi Bond
“Are you sure you won’t stay?” Aunt Anne asked. “Theodore, you know he’d never hurt the kids,” she added.
Aunt Anne was always the voice of reason, but tonight her words weren’t enough.
“Dad, say something,” she said, turning to Granddad who just spat.
“It was an accident, Teddy. No harm was done,” Mom said, with Tedder in her arms. “Let’s stay.”
Dad got into the car and the engine fired to life. Mom looked to her sisters for support, but there was nothing they could do. What could they say? You didn’t interfere in other people’s squabbles. As Mom got in the car, Aunt Anne tucked Frank and me into cozy nests of blankets, giving us each a kiss on the forehead, and softly closed the door.
As the Oldsmobile carefully made its way down the lane, I turned to look at my cousins. They were all standing there, everyone, watching as if they were frozen in time. All except Granddad. He was halfway up the stairs, on his way back into the house.
The car was quiet. We didn’t even see another car on the road that night. Where were all the people? The world was empty except for us. Tedder was asleep in Mom’s lap. Her head leaned against the glass, their combined breath fogging the window.
Frank whispered into my ear. “This is all your fault.”
“You don’t know anything.” I replied. Dad’s eyes shifted to the rear-view mirror, settling on me.
“It’s always your fault. You ruin everything,” Frank repeated, more loudly this time.
“Quiet back there,” Dad said.
Mom didn’t speak and Tedder stirred but didn’t awaken. We passed a silent abandoned barn by the side of the road, fallow fields growing wild around it. Dad would never understand what happened back at Granddad’s. He’d seen too many farm boys dead and maimed. But the Gillespie dares, well, none of us were dead or hurt. Granddad would never let us fall. I looked at Frank and thought how Granddad knew now that I was as good as any boy. Frank pulled a blanket over his head. Mom and Dad would get over being mad. They always did. The lights of the car swept the road as we passed by the Sterling village limits. Drapes were drawn and everything was dark as if we were silently flying into a mysterious night town.
The boys were in bed, but I was too excited to sleep. After Dad tucked us in, I snuck out of my room and crept down the hall, settling into my hiding spot at the top of the stairs. Every night I secretly watched Mom and Dad sitting on the sofa in the living room. Normally they hugged and held hands, talking about their day, but there was no hugging tonight. Tonight their voices were raised, but hushed at the same time, as if they were trying to keep the words muzzled, but sometimes they just slipped out with a power of their own. Like a series of pianissimos followed by unexpected fortes. After all of the piano lessons Mom had made me take, I finally understood what forte meant. It meant force, and it was terrifying.
“In my family we talk,” Mom said.
“He never listens,” Dad replied. His voice shook and I couldn’t make out the rest of the sentence. Dad drove his fist down on the coffee table. The magazines jumped.
This had never happened before. My parents were fighting. Mom always said that decent people didn’t shout any more than they drank. That was as much a part of me as the fact that my hair was blond and my eyes were blue. What was going on? Should I go down and stop them or would I get spanked? Would it make things better or turn them even worse? What could I do to help?
“I don’t run!” Mom said, her voice volleying around the room. She caught herself, glancing quickly up the staircase.
I held my breath, ducking out of sight. Dad’s fists were clenched, pounding steadily on his kneecaps.
“The next time it’s going to be Frank,” Dad said, jumping to his feet, pacing back and forth out of my sightline and then back in.
“No it won’t,” Mom replied.
“This is no good,” Dad said.
They sat there in silence for a moment. Then Dad just stood up and left. I couldn’t see him. Where did he go? Something clattered in the kitchen. Then I heard the cellar door open and footsteps pad down the stairs.
Shaking, Mom tried to pour herself a cup of coffee, but gave up after some of it splashed onto the rug. She didn’t even get up to clean it. Instead she rubbed her neck and began nervously shifting things around on the table. My toes dug into the broadloom. Dad had been gone a long time. The house was quiet. Then the sound of steps coming back up from the cellar and there was a clink of glasses and rummaging in the kitchen. Dad wasn’t getting a snack or I would have heard the refrigerator door. There was a tinkle and a ping. He wasn’t in the kitchen after all. He was in the good china cabinet and what I heard was crystal. Mom looked up.
“What are you doing?”
Dad appeared carrying two cut crystal glasses and a bottle of liquor. I stood up as he set the glasses down. We didn’t drink liquor. It was more than wrong –it was practically evil. Granny Gillespie said she’d turn anyone out of her house who took a drink, and the Barneses never touched the stuff either. Shaking, Dad’s fingers twisted off the cap. The bottle was full of something yellow.
“Teddy,” Mom said so quietly I could barely hear her.
His hand tipped and golden liquid poured into the cut glass. Then he filled the other.
“We don’t drink.”
He handed her a glass. “We don’t fight either.”
The shadow from the church spire crawled down the carpet as Mom and Dad took a drink. The taste must have been really bad, because the second Mom swallowed it, it shot back up as she spewed vomit across the lovely white rug. Dad took the glass and touched Mom’s forehead.
“You’re burning up.”
She pulled away. “I’m fine. I’m just not used to liquor.”
Mom was pinning pieces of a dress pattern onto Dad’s receptionist, while the patients in the adjoining waiting room watched. Ruth was nineteen and recently engaged. When Mom discovered Ruth couldn’t afford a proper engagement outfit she insisted on making one for her. Ruth said she felt she was being a burden.
“Every woman needs a little black dress,” Mom replied, her mouth full of pins.
“You shouldn’t talk with pins in your mouth,” I said, leafing through a copy of Teenage Confidential. “You could swallow them and they’d become lodged in your trachea or bowels.”
“How would they get them out?” Ruth nervously asked.
I was too busy staring at a pin-up of the Monkees to answer. I’d begged for their new record, any new record, but Mom wouldn’t let rock and roll into the house. It was old people music or nothing.
“Maddy, put that magazine down. It’s too mature for you,” Mom said, silver pins flashing between her lips.
Florence burst into the waiting room. She was a farmer’s wife who came in every week or so complaining of an imaginary gut ache. Florence staggered up to the reception, seized the counter and asked for Dad. He was busy giving a local farmer a pain shot.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.
I’d been working in Dad’s office since I was born. When Mom couldn’t take me shopping or playing bridge, Dad parked me on top of the filing cabinet in my bassinette while he treated the patients. I’d grown up there and never really gotten into the habit of playing with other kids.
Florence seized me by the arm. “I’m feeling poorly.”
“Your skin does look a little grey. Why don’t I take your temperature?”
Florence sat on the edge of the examining table while I removed a thermometer from a sterilized glass jar.
“Open your mouth.”
Florence did as she was told, but when Dad walked in Florence leapt off the examining table.
“Oh, Dr. Barnes, my stomach’s acting up again.”
“Let’s check you out first.”
While Dad and Florence chatted, he looked into her eyes, took her pulse and tested her joints with a reflex hammer. Up went the knee. Mom said that Florence was in love with Dad, but Dad and I kn
ew better. Florence was in love with the attention.
“You just wait here while I get you some tablets.”
Florence’s eyes went wide as I followed Dad into the dispensary. The walls were covered in shelves brimming with large and small brown bottles full of all kinds of tablets, capsules and liquids. Dad removed a bottle of red pills from the top shelf and poured a handful into a white paper packet. I hopped up onto the stainless steel stool.
“What are you giving her?”
“Sugar pills. There’s nothing like the power of the placebo.”
Dad had every kind of medicine in the world in his dispensary. If the drugstore was closed Dad had to be able to give his patients the medication they required. I opened one of the big bottles and stuck my hand in. Tiny pills slid through my fingers like grains of sand. Dad handed me a bottle of clear liquid and asked me to give it to Ruth.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Demerol.”
While Dad left to give Florence her magic pills, I opened The Canadian Pharmaceutical Compendium to see what Demerol did. There was the entry: Demerol: 50 mg every three hours for pain.
“I wish your father wouldn’t keep this stuff on site,” Ruth complained, hiding the Demerol in a drawer with the other restricted drugs. “Some dope fiend could rob the place.” The pieces of pattern made her look like a scarecrow.
Ruth crinkled her nose as Florence walked out and Dad walked in. “You should bill her.”
“It’s only a bit of my time,” Dad replied, picking up another patient file as Mom removed pieces of pattern.
“Can you talk some sense into this husband of yours?” Ruth asked.
“About what?”
“He’s treating people for free again.”
Some of the people Dad treated were poor farmers and had to pay in chickens, pies and produce.
“Oh, I think that’s all right now and again,” Mom replied. “You never know when you might need some help.”
I slumped down in the chair, listlessly flipping through the pages of an old medical journal I’d already read twice.
“What’s wrong with you?” Mom asked. “You’ve been sulky for weeks.”
“I don’t have any friends.”
Mom and I always said we were best friends, but now I wanted friends my own age. Frank appeared in the doorway in his baseball jersey. He was lead pitcher for the Sterling Squirts.
“You have to be nice to have friends,” Frank said.
“Shut up.”
“We don’t say ‘shut up’ in this house,” Mom said.
“Every now and again we do,” Dad replied.
He asked Mom how her day was going. Mom said she didn’t get all her cleaning done.
“I had to take a nap. Can you imagine that? Me napping.”
“You should have asked me to tuck you in,” Dad said.
Mom smiled.
“How do you make friends?” I asked.
“Let’s see what I can do,” Mom replied.
The doorbell rang and I ran to get it. Betsy and Sandy stood there with their mothers. Mom came up behind me, drying her hands on a tea towel.
“Thank you for bringing the girls,” she said to the mothers.
Mom asked me who I wanted to be friends with and then she’d actually gotten them to come over. Betsy and Sandy were the two most popular girls in school. Betsy already had a boyfriend, Brad, who followed her around like a collie. Sandy’s mom craned her neck, trying to get a look into the living room.
“Would you two like some coffee?” Mom asked, noting their curiosity.
The mothers glanced at one another. A chance to see Laura Barnes’s house was an offer not to be refused.
“If it’s not too much trouble,” Betsy’s mother replied.
“No trouble at all,” Mom said. “I’m just so happy that the girls came over to play with Madeline.” She turned to me. “Why don’t you show your friends your room?”
Betsy was drawing colourful butterflies with my new pencil set while Sandy leafed through Atlas of Diseases of the Upper Gastrointestinal Tract. Dad had given it to me for Christmas and I’d forgotten to hide it, worried that they’d think I was weird for having a book like that. But Sandy was fascinated by all the pictures of blood and guts. Betsy leaned over to take a peek.
“It is not uncommon to find a prolapse,” Sandy read. “What’s a prolapse?”
“It’s when something falls in on itself,” I replied.
Betsy painted the butterfly’s wing a crimson red. “Like what?” she asked, running her fingers through her long black hair. Betsy was so beautiful. Mom would never let me wear my hair long.
“We had a sick baby in here once with a prolapsed lung. It was terrible. It was a stormy night last winter. Maybe you remember the blizzard just before Christmas?”
Sandy picked at a beauty mark on her cheek that made her look like Marilyn Monroe. “Yeah, one of our cows wandered out of the barn and died in the snow. What happened?”
They were both staring at me. I liked the attention.
“It was a night in the middle of the winter and there was a blizzard raging outside. Suddenly there was a terrible banging at the front door and a woman screamed.” The lady hadn’t really been screaming but it sounded more dramatic that way.
Betsy stopped colouring. I opened my eyeballs as wide as I could for effect and breathlessly continued.
“We all ran down the stairs, and when Dad threw open the door a farmer and his wife were standing in the middle of the driving snow. The wife had a baby wrapped in a blanket. And the baby was…blue.”
They gasped. I shook my head in dismay.
“Lucky I was there.”
“You helped?” Betsy asked. “How would you know what to do?”
“I’ve been helping take care of patients since I was four,” I replied, and was about to continue with how I was going to take over the practice one day, but I could tell that they didn’t want to hear about me.
“Dad scooped up the baby in his arms, while I ran ahead and turned on all of the lights in the office and put a sterilized sheet on the bed. The mother was going out of her mind with fear.”
“So then what happened?” Betsy asked, biting her nails.
“It was a prolapsed lung.”
Nobody breathed.
“The lung was collapsing in on itself?” Sandy asked. “What did you do? What did you do?”
“I called the ambulance.”
“They took a call from a kid?”
I tried out a modest shrug. “Sometimes I help my Dad out. They know me at the OPP.”
“Wow,” Betsy said, still looking at the prolapse. “That’s so cool. Nothing like that ever happens over at my house.”
“What happened to the baby?” Sandy asked, returning to the book.
“It lived. Thanks to my Dad.”
Sandy was eating an apple, but I couldn’t finish my lunch. Betsy and Brad disappeared into the woodlot behind the school, and I was worried about Betsy. Mom always said the worst thing that could happen to a woman was to lose her virginity before she was married. If that happened, the girl would be banished from the company of decent people. It was a fate worse than death. The foliage rustled. What were they doing?
“Have you ever been Frenched?” Sandy asked.
“What’s that?”
“A French is when the boy sticks his tongue in your mouth.”
“Doesn’t it make you gag?”
Sandy opened her mouth, sticking out her tongue for a demonstration.
“A good Frencher knows just how much tongue to use,” she said, giving her tongue a flick. “They’ve got to slip it in, find your tongue, and then the two tongues dance.”
I couldn’t imagine tongues dancing.
“But you have to be sure you don’t get them too worked up.”
“Why?”
“Because of their penises,” Sandy said. “If you get a penis too excited, a boy can’t be responsible for what happe
ns. That’s why girls have to make sure they don’t tease the boy too much. If they do, then the girl gets what she deserves.”
“Hi.” Kenneth was standing in front of me spinning his sneaker in the dirt. Kenneth was the shortest boy in our grade, but he was the biggest jock. I’d had a crush on him since Grade Two when he’d given me a red ribbon he’d won in a race. We hadn’t talked much since, but after the story about the blue baby, I was part of the cool clique. Kenneth sat down beside me, leg bouncing up and down like a jackhammer.
“Are you going to the dance?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied, trying to act nonchalant. Secretly I was desperate to go, but nobody had asked me.
“So if you did decide to go, maybe you’d like to come with me?”
“I guess that would be okay.”
“Should I pick you up?”
Mom would never allow it. “I’ll meet you there.”
“Okay,” and then he ran back to the ball diamond.
I was stretched across the bed on Mom’s green eiderdown, while she sat at the vanity table rooting through her cosmetic bag. Her precious bottle of Eau de Joy was displayed against the beveled mirror. I caught my own reflection. Did liars really go to hell? It was probably too late already because I’d just lied to my mother for the very first time. The thought made my stomach hurt, but Mom would never let me go to the dance if I told her the truth. Maybe lying was a part of growing up.
Mom patted the floral, padded bench. I sat down beside her and looked in the vanity mirror again. It was no wonder Mom told me to watch my weight and stop biting my fingernails. She was the most beautiful woman in the world, and compared with her I was plain ugly.
“I need rouge.”
“No you don’t. Look at me.”
I turned. She smiled and brought her hands up to my cheeks, quickly pinching them. It stung. Then she gave me a kiss on the nose.
“There you go.”
I turned to the mirror. Mom’s pinches gave me a nice rosy glow.
“What about lipstick?”
Mom twisted a golden tube and up popped a pretty pink spear.
“What do you think of this?”
It was beautiful. “Will you show me how to put some on?”